Today I learned something new. It’s an interesting thing, SEO. How a small change in one are can impact others in ways that one wouldn’t predict. Well such an event recently occurred in our own rankings.
it’s been a while but I enjoy testing different title and description combinations on our site to see if we can increase our clickthroughs or target new phrases without impacting what we’ve got. I did just this thing last week when I changed our title from “Expert SEO Services by Beanstalk” ro “Organic SEO Services by Beanstalk”. A small change but I thought the traffic might be more focused as we don’t actually offer paid search services. The effect was interesting.
Admittedly – we increased a bit for a few phrases. “organic seo services” was one of them though we only went to page two for that one. The big effect, we lose the sitelinks that we’ve had for well over a year. Below our description we’ve had 3 or 4 sitelinks for ages. The second the new title got cached we lost them. I’m going to admit it – I had no idea that Google tied changes in site titles to sitelinks.
Will we get them back again? Probably (or is that hopefully?)
If I had to guess I’d assume that Google is now trying to figure out which pages and phrases are most relevant. We’ll keep you posted on timeframes for them to come back and any actions we took to speed things up. 
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 6:50 pm
